


photosynthesize and drink up the sunrise

by vvirago



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Teenagers, Christmas, Cults, Established Relationship, Family, M/M, Rey Skywalker, of the secular variety
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-04
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2020-07-30 19:34:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20102479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vvirago/pseuds/vvirago
Summary: Written for the tfa_kink prompt:A young Ben Solo ran away from home and joined a cult. He and Hux meet there, and eventually they end up leaving together. Afterwards just show up at the Organa-Solo-Skywalker residence for Christmas the next year.





	photosynthesize and drink up the sunrise

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously the thing to do when you write a Christmas fill for a kinkmeme prompt in February is to post it on ao3 in August four years later. Original post found here: https://tfa-kink.dreamwidth.org/1082.html?thread=287546#cmt287546.

“_This_ is your house?” asked Hux, staring up at the two-story cookie-cutter clapboard monstrosity nestled cheerfully in a tree-lined snow-smothered cul-de-sac, festooned with blinking red-blue-green-yellow fairy lights, strewn with pine garlands, and crowned by an inflatable Santa lit from within and grinning maniacally from the chimney—“I thought your parents were supposed to be important!”

“I did run away for a reason,” said—well, Ben, now, though really Hux thought Ren had a better ring to it, even if Kylo did sound like the end result of some douchebag Kyle falling into a vat of cereal.

“So why are we back now?” Hux hissed.

Ben turned his disturbingly dark, limpid eyes against Hux. “I’m cold. And hungry. And you’ve never had Christmas before.”

Hux had some fairly obvious replies to this, such as _we stole enough cash when we cleared out to live in hotels for a month_, and _we passed an entire strip mall’s worth of restaurants on our way here_, but Ben, contrary to his own beliefs, had never been subtle, and it really was frigid here in the middle of the icy street.

“So are you going to knock?”

“Yes,” said Ben.

They clambered up the front steps and huddled against the stoop a while longer.

“Are you going to make us wait out here until we freeze to death?”

“No,” said Ben.

“Eventually someone is going to open this door,” Hux pointed out.

“Maybe,” said Ben.

“I’m going to knock,” said Hux. “Or else we’re going to show up looking like starving orphans.”

Hux watched the scathing retort on Ben’s lips form and wither. “Yeah,” said Ben. “Okay.”

“Okay.” Hux steeled himself, inexplicably rattled by the golden light blooming through the windowpanes and the snatches of laughter muffled against the door. Here they two were, still in their smoke-stained uniforms, and he not even the prodigal son returned. He pressed the doorbell.

A musical two-tone sounded. Hux extrapolated confusion at the dinner table from unintelligible fragments of overheard conversation, but didn’t need to imagine the pelting footsteps and sharp bang of a small body recoiling off the door before it swung open at speed, revealing a girl in a red party dress and ribbons in her hair. 

“Hi,” she said cheerfully. “Who’re you?”

“Is it a stranger?” said an adult, following at a more sedate pace, but some aborted movement of Ben’s from where he hovered behind Hux’s shoulder drew the girl’s attention. 

“Ben!” she squealed, drawing him inside by the hand. Hux, unwilling to be stuck on the porch by himself, slid in after him. “Everyone was just talking about you! I didn’t know you were coming home for Christmas.”

“Ben?” someone echoed, and then suddenly the small, brightly-lit foyer seemed full of bodies, exclaiming and gesticulating and sobbing and throwing themselves at Ben, whose face was very pale as he submitted to these embraces.

Hux, unlike Kylo Ren, did not naturally tend to skulking. This left him hovering uncertainly by the door with his shoulders attempting to draw up around his ears. _Comportment_, he thought to himself, observing this horrifying scene.

_Save me_, Ben mouthed, but then someone who must’ve been his mother buried her face in his shoulder and he jerked his face to the side, though not before Hux saw his face scrunch up, his mobile mouth folding like a fan. So it was probably too late for him. Hux wished he’d argued more in favor of hotels and room service.

By the by everyone extracted themselves enough to notice him where he was not-skulking in the corner. 

“Um, right,” said Ben, shiningly damp-faced. “That’s Hux.”

Hux attempted to convey, with his eyes, that Ben had the brains of an amoeba and the social graces of a Pomeranian. He must’ve been at least somewhat successful, because Ben continued, “Hux, this is my mom, and my dad, and Uncle Luke, and my cousin Rey,” indicating each with his chin in turn.

“Nice to meet you,” said Hux, internally cringing when the last word upturned like a question.

The Skywalker-Organa-Solo family stared at him curiously. Hux’s face wrestled itself between a charming smile and his most forbidding dead-eyed glare, with indeterminate results.

“Ben’s never brought home a friend before,” said Ben’s mom bracingly. “We’d just started eating when you two showed up. How about you go ahead and dump your bags in the hall and we go back to dinner?”

*

Unfortunately, dinner did nothing to change Hux’s impression that Ben was raised mostly on takeout. Neither did the conversation salvage the meal.

“So, uh, how’d you two meet?” ventured Ben’s dad from behind a tinsel-bedecked candelabra.

“In the First Order,” said Ben, as if facing twenty-two needles and a chainsaw.

_Kylo Ren tried to choke me to death and I hit him over the head with a loaded gun because we both wanted to be Snoke’s favorite_, thought Hux. _Then we fell in love out of mutual desperation, so technically you might in fact be working off the right script_.

“Well I’m really glad to have you back with us, sweetheart,” said Ben’s mom, tapping a finger against an open bottle of wine which no one seemed to be in a hurry to pour.

“Yeah,” Ben agreed.

_Turned out Snoke was a megalomaniac who wanted to use a bunch of brainwashed kids to topple the government and make him supreme leader of the world_, Hux explained silently, compulsively. It’d probably been on the news all week, but he could hardly blame Ben’s family for not wanting to bring up mass murder on Christmas Eve. And anyways, they’d submitted all the evidence anonymously.

Ben’s Uncle Luke, who looked about eighty years old, glowered silently at Hux from underneath his impressively bushy brows.

Hux wished Rey would talk more. He was under the impression that children were supposed to say cute, cheerful, off-kilter ice-breaking things. Instead Rey looked piercingly from one individual at the table to the next with a bright, weirdly Ben-like gaze.

The table lapsed into silence. Hux focused on his green beans. They were dishwater-green and half the stems were still attached, but he wasn’t about to complain.

Ben’s hand landed tentatively onto his knee. Hux slipped his hand under the table and curled Ben’s fingers around his. So there was that.

*

“We haven’t really touched your old room,” said Ben’s mom, leading them down the narrow yellow hall. She stopped at the last door on the left. “Do you want the couch, or, Rey’s using the airbed but she can sleep with Luke or I can dig out a sleeping bag, uh—H—uh—” 

She broke off, looking at Hux.

“Hux,” Ben filled in.

“Hux,” Ben’s mom echoed. 

Hux watched Ben. Coming out of the closet when your family already knew you’d spent the past three years as a high-ranking member of a cult of pseudo-child soldiers didn’t seem like that big of a deal, but Hux himself hadn’t spoken to his father since he was about six, so he could concede this was far from his area of expertise. Also, boyfriends probably weren’t usually also fellow cult escapees.

Ben shrugged at him.

“No, it’s okay,” said Hux, startled by his own voice. He squared his shoulders and made eye contact with Ben’s mom, even though it turned out the top of her head didn’t even come close to his chin. “We can share the bed.”

“It’s pretty small, but suit yourself,” she said briskly. “Towels and toothbrushes are all where they used to be. Ben can show you. Don’t go to bed as you are, you two are filthy.”

“Okay, Mom,” said Ben.

“Just yell if you need anything,” said Ben’s mom, and went back down the stairs.

*

“I didn’t realize you were _actually_ an emo,” said Hux later, wedged stubbornly against Ben’s bony back in his twin-size bed. He probably wouldn’t fall out in the middle of the night, but only because they’d been trained to sleep standing up with eyes wide open.

“Shut up,” said Ben. “I was thirteen the last time I used this room.”

“You have Hot Topic stickers on your mirror,” Hux pointed out. “Someone did a really bad job painting your walls black. And there’s a hole in the plaster.”

Ben gave an irritated twitch of his shoulders which almost displaced Hux altogether. They’d left the door curved open by mutual agreement, and a half-moon of light spilled into the room like lemonade, leaving a grey staticky film over Hux’s vision. Ben’s family tiptoed over to peer in, backlit, one by one.

“Good night, boys,” said Ben’s mom, first.

Then Ben’s dad: “It really is good to have you back, kid. You don’t even know what it was like.”

Ben’s uncle stood in the doorway for a long time. “I’m sorry, Ben,” he said at last.

Ben pretended to sleep through all of it, though Hux could feel the hitches in his breath, so mostly Hux tried to go to sleep for real.

Finally Rey skipped in and went straight for the hug. “I missed you,” she whispered to Ben.

“You don’t even remember me,” Ben whispered back.

“Do too.” She rounded the bed to Hux’s side. “Do you want a hug too?”

He stared, then puffed out a breath. “Why?”

“Is that a yes?” She was very persistent. Her eyes were vast and liquid. Hux wriggled around so he could hold out his arms.

With her head tucked under his chin she was warm and sharp-elbowed and fuzzy-haired and soft in her center mass, reminding him of nothing more than Millicent, who had been nowhere to be found when they’d fled Snoke’s compound in the dead of night and yowled like a banshee whenever anyone tried to carry her anywhere, anyway.

“I have to go to bed,” said Rey eventually, squirming free. “If I’m not asleep in time then Santa won’t bring presents.”

“Do you believe in Santa Claus?” Hux couldn’t help asking.

“Maybe,” said Rey seriously. “But I like presents, either way. Good night!”

Hux listened to the pitter-patter of her feet down the hall. 

Hux assumed Rey woke up at the crack of dawn and tore through her presents like children did on television, but he and Ben slept clear through to eleven o’clock with, as far as he was aware, no one to disturb them. They made out for a while, after, before the Evanescence poster got too wearing on Hux’s sanity and the scent of bacon and fried eggs began to permeate the room. Somehow First Order breakfasts invariably consisted primarily of oatmeal, though the rest of the meals indicated a perfectly competent cook.

Since they owned no clothes but their First Order uniforms, which somehow seemed injudicious to wear to Christmas brunch, Hux descended the stairs with his ankles protruding from the hems of thirteen-year-old Ben’s jeans while Ben lurked behind him in much-abused sweatpants and translucent white tee, the discovery of all of which had taken considerable trial and error. In the end, Hux supposed, it was probably more advantageous to look ridiculous than prideful.

“Merry Christmas,” Rey sang out, apparently gotten over whatever reticence had seized her at dinner the night previous, and brandished an elegantly-hewn staff at them with surprising deftness.

Ben’s dad looked up from where he was flipping pancakes, though his mom and uncle kept nursing their coffees at the breakfast table. “Looks like the kids are all up.”

“Morning,” replied Hux crisply, almost drowning out Ben’s mumble. He thought he rather preferred Kylo Ren, who at least wasn’t always trying to use him as a human shield. Ben elbowed him in that creepily intuitive way he had sometimes.

“Go ahead and help yourselves,” said Ben’s mom, nodding at the breakfast food spread over the countertop. 

The bacon fulfilled all its promise, and the breakfast nook, with pale golden midwinter sun pouring in through the slatted blinds and bleaching the honey oaken table blond, was considerably friendlier than the dining room and thick white china of the night before. As Hux ate a comfortable hum of irrelevant conversation droned by: vacation planning, gossip about distant friends, interrogating Rey about her opinions on school. He wondered if Ben’s family was really a good example of normality, considering, well, Ben. Kylo Ren. And all three of his adult family members were supposed to be war heroes and his mom the scion of a political dynasty, so for all he knew they were playacting as much as Ren always did.

Rey was very earnestly telling Ben all about her awesome new quarterstaff, now, while the adults looked on indulgently.

“That’s cool,” said Ben, sounding actually fond. Usually daylight turned his hair lank and his skin pasty, but as he smiled at Rey he looked like a real boy, a mole dotted like a dimple in his cheek.

*

They went out to the movies, that afternoon, after plundering Ben’s dad’s closet for more presentable clothing, and then to dinner: at a steakhouse, and Hux didn’t know how to explain his presence, much less how to pay his share of the bill when Ben’s mom’s credit card was whisked away and returned with hardly a murmur. “Why did you bring me here?” Hux asked Ben under his breath, squeezed together in the corner of the cracked leather booth.

“I didn’t choose the restaurant,” said Ben.

“You know that’s not what I mean,” said Hux, though he wasn’t sure he did, really: both Ben and Kylo Ren could be astonishingly thick in the strangest ways.

“Where else were we supposed to go?” 

“Anywhere,” muttered Hux furiously. “Or—if you wanted to go back to playing happy family—why did you take me with you?” 

“We don’t have to stay,” said Ben. “We can go anywhere you want, next.”

“I don’t _have_ anywhere to go.”

“So why not here?”

Hux stared at Ben, irrationally betrayed.

“Now what are you boys whispering so much about?” cut in Ben’s dad from across the table, smirking like Ren did when back when he’d terrorized the younger kids, before Phasma had kicked his ass. Who knew where Phasma was, now. Not in foster care, he hoped. 

“Nothing,” said Ben, and allowed himself to be drawn into a passionate discussion about the Pixar movie they’d just seen, Rey’s piping voice raised in dedicated defense of the villain-turned-heroine of the story. Hux gave Ben’s dad a tight smile and tucked his arm around Ben’s waist, pressing his fingertips against the bare skin where his borrowed shirt rode up above his too-small jeans. 

*

“It was brave, what you two did,” said Ben’s mom that night, after Rey had gotten quieter and droopier and finally Ben’s uncle had scooped her away to bed. Ben’s family had a fireplace, of course, and the fire flickered merrily in the far wall of the living room, curling a velvety blue at the base where the gas filtered through the fake logs.

“No it wasn’t,” said Ben, which was one of the few things he and Hux had conclusively managed to agree on from the moment they’d fumbled their way onto the interstate in the wastes of Nevada. If there was one thing Snoke’s betrayal had taught him, Hux thought cynically, it was how to finally stop lying to himself.

“Of course it was,” she said, wisps of hair escaping from her coiled braid, crow’s feet worn deeper by the unsteady light. She looked at Hux as if expecting his support, but he had been following Ben’s lead for days, now. Ben wasn’t the one who’d destroyed everything he’d ever known. 

“Sure, Mom,” said Ben. They perched side-by-side on the loveseat, no tables to hide wandering hands. Ben would’ve been too young before he left to bring girlfriends home, Hux thought, as he consciously flattened each finger against his thighs. Now Ben curled his arms around his knees, hair swinging forward to curtain his face. Kylo Ren had usually strode about, and always leaned forward when he sat, intent, cowl rising like a rampart around his neck, but he’d never held Hux’s hand, either, even at the end, when after they got each off he kept falling asleep with his face pressed wet and graceless against Hux’s collarbone.

“I can speak to the authorities on your behalf,” Ben’s mom continued. “There might be consequences, but they’ll be lenient, since you’re both still minors and you were—taken advantage of—mentally conditioned—”

“Okay,” said Ben. 

Hux managed to quash his impulse to give Ben an incredulous glare or, better yet, seize him by the shoulders and shake him like a doll. Ben’s dad was, after all, still coiled in the armchair, and although in the balance of things his mom was probably scarier his dad was more likely to bodily throw him out.

“We’ll see about getting you enrolled in school again, though I have no idea what you’ve been learning all these years or what we’re going to do about your transcript—you’ll probably have to take placement tests even if you go back to Luke’s school—”

“What about Hux?” Ben interrupted. Hux tried and failed to cool a warm glow of unsolicited gratitude.

Ben’s mom looked awkward for the first time. “We didn’t want to ask, but—”

“My mother’s dead,” said Hux. “My father’s presumably been arrested by now.”

“No other family?”

“Not that either anyone ever mentioned.”

“By default that makes you a ward of the state.” She looked damnably sympathetic, that woman.

“I’ll emancipate.”

“That’s not really as simple a process as you might think,” Ben’s mom began, but his dad cut in, “How old are you anyways, kid?”

“I’m eighteen in five months,” said Hux stiffly, bizarrely conscious of the year-and-a-half age gap between him and Ben.

“So he can do whatever he wants for five months and then he can do whatever he wants after. I don’t see why you’re worrying about him so much.”

“He might not even have any legal identity documents. He obviously has no idea what he’s doing,” Ben’s mom retorted.

“Is it obvious? It’s not obvious to me. What is obvious is that he’s a manipulative little snake—”

“He hardly could’ve helped being raised in that cesspit of humanity; don’t you feel any responsibility for your part in letting that madman Snoke walk free?”

“So what, we’re running a halfway house for homicidal kids since you feel so bad—”

“He’s hardly just any kid, he’s our son’s only friend—”

“Oh, is that what they’re calling it now—”

“Well it’s true, you thickheaded dolt!” finished Ben’s mom.

“Thanks, Mom,” said Ben into the silence.

_Seriously_, thought Hux. _Thanks a lot_.

“I’m going to talk to Uncle Luke,” Ben continued, abandoning Hux on the loveseat. Fortunately Ben’s parents rapidly made their excuses as well, vanishing into the unlit kitchen. Hux suspected they were going for the wine, or possibly vodka. He would like, very much, a bottle or five of wine himself. Instead he went to hide in Ben’s childhood bedroom.

*

“I’m not staying,” said Hux, the moment Ben returned, locking the door behind him.

“Yeah, I know,” said Ben. “I’ll leave them a letter and a, an email address, I guess—”

“You have an email?”

“I can _make_ one,” said Ben crossly.

“Well, hurry up about it.”

“I’m _working on it_.”

“Is it weird to run away from home in the dead of night twice?” asked Hux, genuinely curious.

“Technically, I ran away from school last time.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Guess I’ll be better at it this time.”

“At least that won’t be hard.”

“Shut up,” said Ben, but he was grinning a little, and studiously gentle even as he tackled Hux over onto his bed. Fortunately the springs didn’t squeak, even when subject to considerable abuse, and the darkness muffled any softer, wetter sounds. Take that, Evanescence poster.

*

It wasn’t really the dead of night: buses didn’t run to this neighborhood before six, for one thing. In the pearl-grey false dawn, the snow seemed as pristinely luminous as ever, though Hux could hear meltwater, the underside of snowbanks trickling and then rushing into storm drains and sewers, streams, sea.

“Are you two leaving?” asked Rey, poking her head around the front door and taking half a decade off Hux’s life, not to mention startling Ben into dropping his duffel bag onto his foot.

“Yep,” said Hux, snickering.

“But we’ll be back,” interjected Ben hastily. “And we’ll write you letters. And send you presents for your birthday. When’s your birthday again?”

“June twenty-first,” said Rey. “Promise?”

“Pinky promise,” said Ben solemnly. They shook pinkies, skin dyed neon orange by an unexpected streak of sunrise.

“I’ll beat you up if you break it,” Rey threatened, surprisingly intimidating in her bare feet and pajamas—though, then again, she did own a quarterstaff considerably longer than she was tall.

“I won’t,” said Ben.

“But I won’t tell Aunt Leia and Uncle Han you’ve left,” Rey continued.

“You better not,” said Hux.

“Though don’t lie to them if they ask,” added Ben.

“Of course not,” said Rey.

“We’re going to miss the bus,” said Hux.

“No we’re not,” said Ben, even though he couldn’t read a clock to save his life, but nevertheless he bundled Rey up into a hug as she slung her arms around his neck and planted a wet smack on his cheek. Ben whispered something into her ear. Not entirely unexpectedly, she threw herself Hux after Ben set her down, so he had to pick her up, too, lest she brain herself on his ribs. She staked her claim with another kiss before she wriggled out of his arms and dashed back indoors.

“Bye,” she sing-songed, waving energetically, and slid the front door shut. Hux wiped at the spit on his face with the back of his hand, bemused. 

“It’s going to be really embarrassing if my parents catch us on their front porch,” Ben pointed out after a long moment.

Hux gestured toward the horizon. “So lay on, MacDuff.”

“I _am_,” said Ben. He marched down the porch steps and across the driveway, cutting a fine and impressive figure and stopping to flail over a surprise ice patch only once. Those shoulders, those hips, that ridiculous rock star hair, stark as a pirate flag against the endless white of suburbia.

Hux indulged in a spot of possessive ogling before hefting his own bag and slip-sliding into the great unknown.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Vienna Teng's "Never Look Away," which is relevant if you squint.


End file.
